Still Life with Flowers 

This painting of flowers was made by Constantin Piliuta, although the exact date is unknown. At first glance, it is a still life in a conventional style; it represents blooms in vases. But look closer, and you will see how the handling of paint gives the work its character. Piliuta favored a dry brush technique, where the paint is lightly dragged across the surface, leaving areas of the canvas exposed. The pink flowers almost seem transparent. This gives the painting a feeling of being incomplete, as though we are seeing the artist's process laid bare. In this sense, Piliuta's painting can be seen to resist the polished aesthetic of so much traditional still life. He is less interested in representation, and more in the activity of painting. The open-ended quality of the brushwork invites us to consider the act of looking, and how we too participate in making the image whole.